Demographic Change

I readily concede that, in the past, mere population numbers have neither endowed a country with economic or diplomatic clout, nor necessarily military strength. But that was a time before the sovereignties of the non-West were endowed with competent governments, or had developed a nationalist consensus and modern means of communication and administration. Things are different now. Moreover, the conventional indices of ability to make a mark on the society of states have been joined by some new ones. Take Bangladesh for instance. Until quite recently, the country tended to be dismissed as a ‘basket case’, with no assets save far too many very poor people. Yet can anyone not now assume that a society of (in a few decades) about 100 million young Muslim men (with very few jobs or prospects, a growing trend towards fundamentalism, and the possibility that much of their territory may be inundated by rising sea-levels) has no means of making an impact on the society of states?

Strategic location may also be a major asset: Vietnam is already looking like a useful ally to some of the ‘China hawks’ in the Pentagon, for instance. Regional prestige may prove an asset, as is currently the case for South Africa, and probably will be later for several other powers, including middle powers like Australia. As noted earlier, the world is at present undergoing not only a process of the redistribution of power between its peoples, but also, simultaneously, processes of globalisation, regionalisation and normative shift. Managing the relationship between those four factors of change may need to become a diplomatic art in itself.

The social revolutions of rising populations, urbanisation, communications technology, and demands for better lives, must inevitably have major impacts on domestic politics in many Third World countries, just as they did earlier in the First World. Still, their long-term effect is as yet an enigma, as is the effect of the redistribution of power within societies. In the West, political consciousness and an emerging nationalist consensus accompanied industrialisation and rising population numbers. So sometimes did militarism and expansionist tendencies (we need think only of the history of Germany between 1870 and 1941, and also of Japan during that period (and, since 1945, within the ‘Western’ camp). We must not assume that the emerging powers of the non-West will follow the patterns set by their Western predecessors; but we should bear in mind that like causes do tend to produce like effects.